House Stimulus Bill -- State Department follies

Continuing with the analysis of the House Stimulus Bill, HR 1, it is interesting to look at particular department appropriations to see how vague and unconstrained the spending is. For example, Title XI of the Act provides $276 million to the State Department"Capital Investment Fund"in the following language:

"For an additional amount for ‘Capital Investment Fund’, $276,000,000, of which up to $120,000,000 shall be available for the design and construction of a backup information management facility in the United States to support mission-critical operations and projects, and up to $98,527,000 shall be available to carry out the Department of State’s responsibilities under the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative: Provided, That the Secretary of State shall submit to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate within 90 days of enactment of this Act a detailed spending plan for funds appropriated under this heading."

Note that the House bill gives the State Department this money without any understanding of where it will be spent,but simply requires State to provide a list of projects within 90 days after the adoption of the legislation.

$120 million it is provided for construction of a backup data processing center. First, there is no way that such a data center is going to be constructed within the time necessary to provide stimulus to the economy (unless the State Department already has detailed blueprints on the drawing board).

Secondly, this is supposedly for mission-critical operations and projects, but there is no showing that the State Department itself has to construct and own this facility. The Department of Defense and other intelligence agencies contract out all sorts of intelligence-related activities. Operation of a data center would presumably be something that companies like IBM or EDS could do quite well and much more efficiently than a government agency.

House Stimulus Bill -- Regulatory Follies

I have downloaded the House Bill, H.R. 1 -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and will start going through it to analyze the innumerable regulatory follies contained in it. Some of these may never survive in negotiations with the Senate, but many are likely to be adopted. I will focus on single follies in each post. This one will discuss the provision requiring public works to use iron and steel produced in the US, even if it costs 25% more than imports. Thus the Bill provides:

SEC. 1110. USE OF AMERICAN IRON AND STEEL.
(a) IN GENERAL.—None of the funds appropriated
or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for
a project for the construction, alteration, maintenance, or
repair of a public building or public work unless all of the
iron and steel used in the project is produced in the United
States.
(b) EXCEPTIONS.—Subsection (a) shall not apply in
any case in which the head of the Federal department or
agency involved finds that—
(1) applying subsection (a) would be incon-
sistent with the public interest;
(2) iron and steel are not produced in the
United States in sufficient and reasonably available
quantities and of a satisfactory quality; or
(3) inclusion of iron and steel produced in the
United States will increase the cost of the overall
project by more than 25 percent.

Is this a sop to the steel unions? How many billions will this increase the cost of public works created under the program.